Raised Green

There is an area in India where, because of religious beliefs, many folks do not eat onions or garlic... Since I am of the ‘live to eat’ rather than the ‘eat to live crowd’, I tried to imagine cuisine without onions and garlic. 

Unbelievably, though, I survived the first 20 years of my life without garlic (I do believe I’ve made up for it since). With all the amazing fresh produce that emerged from my Dad’s huge and thriving yearly gardens, and with the universal love of anything green and fresh, I don’t now how garlic slipped by them. I think they pretty much stuck to the vegetable array that had filled their plates in childhood.

Thinking about that endless stream of green things to our table, though, they really did stick to the basics: onions (green and yellow), literally tons of potatoes, ears of corn, cauliflower, radishes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage (for vats of homemade sauerkraut) tomatoes, big, yellow Hubbard squashes (to be baked with butter and sugar), a few pumpkins for Halloween carving and cucumbers. There was that odd and wonderful asparagus patch my dad tended lovingly and bunches of rhubarb on the side of the garage. And, oh, his huge and enviable raspberry patch with plants in it that were, he’d proudly explain, ‘75 years old’. 

How spoiled I was by all those readily munchable raspberries, and by the beautiful quart jars filled with peaches, apricots, and pears that lined our basement shelves each year. 

One day each year the whole family, grandparents, aunts, uncles and kids would trek to Wawawi, a sunnier place some twenty miles or so near a river and spend the day picking fruit for canning. 

And they’d bring home extra cucumbers from those picking trips because every year they would “put up” 60 quarts of dill pickles. Only after my cousin married a German fellow who introduced the “amazing” idea of hot peppers amidst the pickles was there a change from the established pattern. After that a certain number of quarts would get the peppers. My Dad had quickly developed a taste for the peppery hotness. Hot peppers had certainly not been a part of those gardens or of the food they ate (wrong soil I now know - hot peppers had grown well in the soil of my husband’s folks in Nevada and, thus had been a part of what he had learned to love). 

There wasn’t a lot of vegetable experimentation. No garlic appeared in our dishes. I never met a bell pepper until I was grown. An avocado was a foreign animal to them. An adventuresome Uncle would return once in a while and enjoy avocado with salt, I heard said. I vividly remember my mom commenting, “They taste like soap”. Though a vegetable lover and willing experimenter, it took me way into my twenties to develop a taste for avocado (in Guacamole) and into my thirties to enjoy it straight on sandwiches. Yeah, I know it’s really a fruit but it seems awfully vegetably to me. 

Tomatoes were eaten fresh, not “put up”. Dad ate the thick sweet slices with salt and pepper. Mom and I loved sugar on ours. In the summer, salads would appear, but they were simple. Iceberg lettuce (my favorite to this day even though some call it the 'polyester of vegetables') and chunks of fresh tomato mixed with mayonnaise. On special occasions, a can of shrimp with be added. The concept of a salad emerging as part of what they ate stuck in my Dad’s memory. He tells the tale of remembering his mother chatting with friends on the party line all agog over the new idea of a “vegetable salad”. He called them vegetable salads all his life. 

Ah the vegetables of my youth all freshly picked and full of taste. And, back to onions, my Dad loved those little green onions; we now call scallions, on a little plate at dinner along side those slices of white bread. He'd eat each one with a little salt. Funny, as so many other dishes were filled with onions, no one ate them straight except dad. I guess maybe there were some chopped into those green salads sometimes.

Later in life I learned to make Indian dishes, I’m amazed at how they combine vegetables. I make a Dahl (a dish that incorporates lentils or dried peas or beans). It’s a heavenly mixture of zucchini, onions, tomatoes and green peppers all swirled together with aromatic spices and at the end combined with yellow peas. My folks would not ever have imagined combining vegetables this way. I guess they combined vegetables when they dumped carrots, potatoes and onions together into a beef stew. The only other vegetable combining I remember was when the “new potatoes” were on. There was new potatoes and fresh peas swimming in a cream sauce with a pinch or two of sugar. It was yummy but certainly not the serious vegetable combining of the Indian dahls.

Ah, see where onions and garlic can lead one? I certainly thank my folks for my love of vegetables. I wish I could share with them some things I’ve learned and amaze them with my vegetable repertoire. I think they’d have loved, or at least tried, anything done with vegetables as long as avocados weren’t in the mix. And, if dad had his garden today, I’ll bet I could convince him to plant some garlic.

Marilyn Michael grew up in the Palouse Country of Eastern Washington. She is the instructor for Wallingford Writers, a writing class that meets at Wallingford Community Senior Center. A freelance writer on eclectic subjects, the gift of a mentor for Indian cuisine inspired her in the direction of writing about food.